At a large trading post owned by a man named Wellmore, Coleman sees Flack and suspects him right away as being one of the killers.

Coleman is asked by a large group of settlers to scout their caravan west, and declines, until he learns that Flack and Lopez were just hired by Wellmore to boss a bull train along the as-yet-unblazed Oregon Trail to a trading post in northern Oregon Territory (which at the time extended into current British Columbia), owned by another Missouri fur trader.

Unwilling to accept her attraction toward him, Ruth gets rather close to a gambler acquaintance of Flack's, who joined the trail after being caught cheating.

The three villains' main reason for going west is to avoid the hangman's noose for previous crimes, and all three receive frontier justice instead.

The settlers trail ends in an unnamed valley, where Coleman and Ruth finally settle down together amidst giant redwoods.

Reputedly (the claim is unconfirmed) the initial script, then called "The Oregon Trail", was first offered to director John Ford who then passed it on to his friend Raoul Walsh.

[8] The scene of the wagon train drive across the country was pioneering in its use of camera work and the depth and view of the epic landscape.

[citation needed] An effort was made to lend authenticity to the movie, with the wagons drawn by oxen instead of horses – they were lowered by ropes down canyons when necessary for certain shots in narrow valleys.

[10] According to Hall, in one sequence, featuring a native American attack, "suddenly it seems as though one were tugged from one's seat and thrown in front of the charging horses, which appear to plunge from the screen and disappear into the velvety darkness of the theatre".

[10] After the box-office failure of the film due to the Depression stopping theatres from investing in widescreen technology, Wayne was only cast in low-budget serials and features (mostly Poverty Row Westerns); although his name was billed above the title in dozens of movies in the 1930s.

[18] A fairly common practice in the early sound era was to simultaneously produce at least one foreign-language version of a film for release in non-English-speaking countries; an approach later replaced by simply dubbing the dialogue.